Tulku

Tulku (2012)

The film details the personal experiences of five young Western men who were identified in childhood as being tulkus, or reincarnated Tibetan Buddhist masters.

Date of release
2012-04-13
Runtime
1h 16m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Gesar Mukpo

Casting

Interesting facts

Tulku is a 2009 documentary film, written and directed by Gesar Mukpo. The film details the personal experiences of five young Western men who were identified in childhood as being tulkus, or reincarnated Tibetan Buddhist masters.

Production

To fund the film, Gesar Mukpo approached the National Film Board of Canada, as part of the Reel Diversity Competition for emerging filmmakers of colour. According to Mukpo:

I had applied to the Reel Diversity program before and not gotten it. So I was skeptical about applying again. A couple of days before the deadline, I hadn't written anything, and I sat down and thought, Screw it, I might as well tell my story.

I didn't want to look and fish for some story. It was just there. I poured it out in two paragraphs.... The idea wrote itself.

This was something that was real, it was true, and it's a story I could tell in a way that nobody else could. As a filmmaker, that's what you want — to make people connect with something real and intimate. I felt this story had that. It's my story.

Tulku took two years to complete, and was shot on location in Nova Scotia, Florida, New York City, India, and Nepal. While Mukpo was filming in Bir, two local Westerners offered to take him and his cameraman paragliding for free, resulting in beautiful aerial shots of Northern India.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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